


Remnant

by Chisotahn



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Gen, p4week2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-06
Updated: 2014-06-06
Packaged: 2018-02-03 14:47:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1748414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chisotahn/pseuds/Chisotahn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Saki's Shadow thought she'd gotten everything she wanted.</p>
<p>She was wrong.</p>
<p>(Written for P4Week2014. True ending spoilers.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remnant

**Author's Note:**

> I hadn't intended to write this! About half of it was actually done way back in 2009, and given the theme for today in #p4week2014 (Shadows)... well, I thought about the old draft last night, looked it up this morning, and decided to finish it up. It's a bit different than it would have been if I'd finished it back then, but I think it's better now. Enjoy!
> 
> (Thanks, always, to Frigoris for her beta work. ♥)

_You're not me!!_

She had been _glorious_.

The Shadow stretched her wings and felt power thrill through her, accompanied by a giddy euphoria like nothing she'd ever known. And it had been so _easy_ , hardly any work at all. Just words, thrown sharp and fast at every weakness, until her original curled in on herself in a tangle of trembling limbs and brown hair, shrieking the incantation that would set her free.

_You're not me!!_

_Yes._

It hadn't been much of a fight.

And now she prowled her tiny kingdom of memory, testing the claws and wings and powerful limbs those three words had given her, the power she'd taken in. The scaffolds rattled with the weight of her movements, lights shaking and throwing odd shadows onto the liquor store far below. She could sense smaller Shadows too, attracted by her ascension. They felt at the edges of her street, her store, pawing at the walls in a hopeless attempt to understand why this small part of their world was suddenly tangible. She'd been aware of them before, distantly; fragments, the debris of human existence, motivated by nothing more than instinct.

She eyed them now with supreme contentment. Once, she'd been pathetic like that, but she was different now. She wasn’t tethered to anyone else, not any more - the thought sent a thrill coursing through her again, and she laughed, arching her strong body down to grab at a lesser Shadow with one hand. Let them slither about, seeking only to fulfill their base hungers. She had loftier goals now.

The Shadow flattened under her touch, let out a high-pitched squeal, and squirmed free.

......

A few days later, more humans arrived. So proud, so stupid. She sensed their presence as they entered her kingdom, watched them pace around and shout at the memory-echoes. One of them cried out her original's name, but she didn't care about that or the sense of familiarity he projected, because he was also casting a Shadow, stretching long and hungry and begging to be set free. She exulted at the thought of another being like her and climbed high into the scaffolding, gazing down upon them with anticipation.

Waiting for the words.

_You're not me!!_

_Yes, oh yes._

She cried out in sheer delight, the sound eaten up by the other Shadow's roar of triumph as he, too, ascended, his form stretching from a mere copy of his original into something new, something powerful. She wouldn't be alone any more. She saw the original topple, saw the Shadow below move to devour - and the other human jumped between them, holding a stick like it would do him any good whatsoever. She hissed at the delay. Pointless posturing, all of it. Hurry up, hurry up, _hurry up_ -

And light blazed, searing, with a crack of sound like nothing she'd ever heard. She recoiled, clinging to her perch, wings snapping up to shelter her as her vision broke into white spots. But she heard the battle below, something putting up more of a fight than her pathetic original had, though surely it was futile. Surely they were unstoppable.

She opened her eyes again at the sudden silence, shifting to see what had happened - and there, below, was the other Shadow, once again reflecting his original with sullen eyes. A sudden fear twisted through her. What had happened? How was that even possible? Her grip on the scaffolds tightened and she felt the metal bend between her talons.

And then an echo, soft but filled with a painful clarity that sent a chill through her.

_I am thou._

_Thou art I._

_Yes_ , something in her wanted to say, _yearned_ to say, but he hadn't been talking to her. She could only watch, eyes wide and hungry, as the other Shadow was... not merely ascended, but transfigured, changing into something more glorious, more _complete_ than she had dreamed possible. Not cut free from his original, but made whole.

_How?_

And then the beautiful being vanished, and a faint whimper escaped her throat. _No, wait, come back, I want to see_ , but her tongue couldn't make human words any more and by the time she remembered the right shape, they were gone.

......

She paced over the scaffolding in a constant, nervous flow, never stopping because to stop was to open herself to that unimaginable longing. The sound of her passage shook the shop and made the lesser Shadows flee. But she could travel this small circuit forever, round and round without tiring, without thinking, without-

_I am thou, thou art I-_

She stopped as if she'd been struck, rocking back and shattering a light with a frantic sweep of one wing. No, no, no, _no._

_... Yes, yes, yes_ , but there was nobody to answer her, no original. Everything that had been Saki Konishi was spread throughout her now, with nothing that remained capable of speaking.

She curled in on herself tightly, her form rupturing into a vague semblance of rippling robes, sometimes flashing white, sometimes houndstooth.

_What we could have been together-_

And she could see it, in the back of her mind - her bright, _shining_ like the other Shadow had become, painful to look at and even more painful to think about. _Her_ , joined with her original, splendid and whole, calling light and darkness both. A woman, elegant in her robes, wings spread around her, feathers fluttering at her temples, ankles, and wrists. She strained, tried to stretch out and flow into that shape without her original to guide her, and failed utterly.

_Orihime-_

The name, not hers, never going to be hers, seared like a brand. She dug her talons sharply into her arms; no pain.

_**Poor thing, lost and adrift without an anchor**_ , and that voice hadn't been her own or a memory of her original's; she hunched into a ball, shaking at the echoing sound and sudden sense of presence, of being watched by an unfathomable gaze. Far below her, the lesser Shadows made screeling noises and darted away. 

_**You killed her with your own hands. What were you expecting?** _

She could not answer, but her skin crawled as a gentle hand brushed along her spine. 

_**Poor thing.** _

And then it was gone, not even a scrap of presence remaining. 

...... 

She'd been so proud, devouring those three words as if they meant salvation rather than doom. She'd been so stupid, so unimaginably stupid - but now she was lost, a lock aching for a key that could never be found. 

Unless she could somehow bring her back, tease her original back out of herself. Make things right. 

She started with the shape. She had a template for that, at least, in the torn photographs that littered the shop. She could reassemble them if she concentrated, used all her will to hold the pieces in place and keep them from scattering again. Forcing the scraps together, making faces and figures, brought vital memories to the surface. Something to hold onto, something she might be able to breathe out until Saki formed in front of her. 

The pieces got a little harder to move every day, a little heavier; she strained to lift a scrap of wavy hair, clinging to the torn edges with digits that couldn't remember if they were fingers, talons, or long black filaments. How many times had she reassembled this particular image? She couldn't remember that, either. 

As the picture slowly came together, she began to reshape her features, casting paranoid glances at her reflection in the coolers behind her. Body first - this size, this shape, dark filaments and lopsided wings smoothing away and vanishing. Then hair, wavy, this color; then refining the face, the line of the nose, the arch of the eyebrows and tilt of the smile. Clothing last, every pleat of the skirt remembered in detail. 

_Perfect._

She turned and admired herself, smiled just so, absolutely identical to the picture she'd copied. The second she directed her full attention onto her own reflection, she heard the photograph fly apart behind her, pieces returning to where they'd been. 

_It was worth it_ , she told herself, gritting her teeth behind that perfect smile, ignoring the frantic flap under her skin. She stared at her reflection and waited for the eyes in the glass to become brown, not yellow. 

But they never did. 

...... 

The Saki-semblance didn't last long, and every time she lost it, when she forgot the right way to smile, when her perfect skin slipped open and let a wing flop free, something else broke too. Usually it was the door of the cooler, smashed in by one amorphous, fluxing limb that had forgotten how to be a proper hand; the cracks in the glass healed the minute she turned away, no matter how thoroughly she laid waste to it. She could leave no mark on the world capable of existing for more than a few minutes. She could shriek all she liked, to no avail; the scaffolding and scenery failed to bounce back even the smallest echo of her voice, no matter how loud she was. The picture scraps had become impossible to move. 

"Come back," she moaned, "come back, come _back_ , where did you go," and she buried her face in her hands as the memory-echoes laughed at her. Desperate, she flowed onto the scaffolding and clawed her way up, up, _up_ , as high as she could go until she could see nothing but yellow fog below her, and there were no more handholds she could reach. 

"Come back," she screamed, crying out for Saki, for the goddess who'd come to watch her, who'd called her _poor thing_ and then left her alone forever. "Come back, come back, come back-" 

She cried into the fog until her voice shriveled up and died. Only then did she give in, plummeting to the floor so far below like a falling star. Her impact left no crater, and when she swam up out of the pain she was still alone. She cracked her talons on glass that refused to shatter, pounded her fists into wood that did not break, and heard no answer. 

...... 

She had nothing left. 

She could no longer slip into her original's shape. _Human_ she knew, she saw them sometimes and heard their footsteps, cowered in their wakes. She could do that, do skin, do hair, manage a pale imitation. But it was wrong, all wrong. She could attempt one thing at a time, perhaps two, hair and skin together, or eyes and smile, but never all of them at once. Not now. And when she saw that flawless smile superimposed on a black-streaked body, perfect eyes sliding in a face that couldn't remember the right shape, she cried out in fear and fled back into the scaffolding. 

She avoided the shop interior from then on, hiding from anything reflective; _monster, wrong, broken, drifting_ , it was all too much of a reminder. The lesser Shadows she chased away, hissing, wings flapping and talons outstretched. They ran from her. At least _they_ acknowledged her existence. 

She chased them, reaching out with long, dark arms, and tried very hard not to realize how much she looked like them. 

...... 

_I was wrong, all this time_ , she thought, muzzily, as she slid along the edges of the walls, clinging to every corner, every dip in the tiles, one small part of a river of blackness. _They're not lesser. Not debris. They're us-_

_I am thou, thou art I._

The hysterical sound bubbled out of her without warning, a cry of despair, negation, longing. The other little Shadows looked at her, then turned back to their own movements. 

...... 

Time meant nothing. 

The Eye looked upon her. 

_**Pathetic creature.**_

She fled. 

...... 

And then the world began to move. 

She hid with the others, pulling her limbs inward in fear as a wave of power coursed over them, snapping being out of potential so sharply that it made everything tremble. She had known the Eye, once _pathetic creature_ but it had gazed upon her and been dissatisfied _she could have been beautiful, I am thou thou art-_ but this was something new. 

Something... glorious. 

The light that dawned in the wake of that wave made them all cower, a puddle of amorphous darkness. At first, she had no words, was incapable of comprehending what was happening - and then a shape resolved into _tree_ , she knew what that was, or someone had, once. 

And another tree. 

Hill. 

River. 

With a soft sigh, the little Shadows stretched upwards, darkness giving way to a sudden flutter of bright, paper-thin wings. Oh. _Oh._ Yes, this was something; this was an answer, finally, to that longing that had eaten a hole in the heart of her. The sun warmed her all through and they rose together on a sudden breeze, so sweet, scented with flowers. 

She saw the humans once last time, the breeze coiling the once-Shadows past them in a joyful cascade. _Butterflies_ , one of the humans laughed, and she brushed the edge of one wing against the cheek of a boy she'd once known. 

And they soared together, whole at last, spiraling into the infinite blue sky. 


End file.
